Critic's Notebook; Biography Becomes A Blood Sport

Published: May 20, 1994

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Ms. Beauman, who notes that she prefers "the intuitive approach to straight reportage," uses a graphologist's analysis of Forster's handwriting to suggest that he may have had an early unrequited love affair. And she muses that he might have become "an enormously prolific novelist" had he become a don at Cambridge instead of going off to live in the suburbs. Ungrounded in fact, such conjecture gives the reader no insight into the life of the subject; it simply opens up an endless, and ultimately absurd, sequence of "what ifs."

Equally gratuitous are the bizarre interpolations that occur in Peter Ackroyd's verbose biography of Charles Dickens ("Dickens"), in which the author imagines encounters between the novelist, his characters, other famous writers and himself. In one such section, Mr. Ackroyd recounts a dream he had about meeting Dickens on a train. In another, he writes: "But what if it were possible, after all, for Charles Dickens to enter one of his own novels? To bow his head and cross the threshold, into the world which he had created?"

Awkward and specious as Mr. Ackroyd's interpolations are, they do seem meant to give the reader a fuller impression of Dickens and his creative process; there is no pejorative or philosophical spin to Mr. Ackroyd's imaginings, no ideological impetus to his speculation.

The same cannot be said of other recent biographers, who distort or exaggerate their subjects' lives and accomplishments to make larger points about society or gender. In "Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre," Kate and Edward Fullbrook assert that "Beauvoir was always the driving intellectual power in the joint development of the couple's most influential ideas." And in an effort to prove this thesis, they substitute feminist invective for careful scholarship, conjecture for reasoned analysis.

In "Rage and Fire," Ms. Gray combines prurient speculation about Flaubert's sexual tastes, inflated assessments of Colet's literary importance and silly collections of misogynistic quotations from famous men to try to "resurrect yet another woman whose memory has been erased by the caprices of men." Though "Rage and Fire" is billed as "A Life of Louise Colet, Pioneer Feminist, Literary Star, Flaubert's Muse," the book can hardly be considered a biography in any real sense. Rather, it is a highly polemical, and subjective, essay that happens to use the lives of real people, instead of narrative texts, as its raw material.

This happens all the time, of course, in academia, where novels, songs, films, paintings, even advertisements are routinely deconstructed, reinterpreted, reinvented. Now the same techniques are being applied to real people, real lives. The development gives new meaning to the British writer John Arbuthnot's observation, made back in the 18th century, that biography is "one of the new terrors of death." Lives as Lived, or as They Might Have Been